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When the Comintern sent a letter to several national parties emphasizing the need for unity with the Socialists, the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français [PCF]) started negotiations with the French Socialists that same day. The PCF proposed a unity pact with the Socialists providing for joint demonstrations and the cessation of attacks on each other. This chapter focuses on the Popular Front alliance of Socialists and Communists, examining how the coded cables shed light on the endorsement of the developing Popular Front.

Whereas the interwar time period saw the most innovative developments within specialised Catholic Action taking place within its working class youth organizations, the closing years of World War Two and the immediate post‐liberation period witnessed pathbreaking experiences of radicalization above all in its adult working class organizations. The Mouvement Populaire des Familles (MPF) emerged out of concentrated efforts by Catholic social activists to provide much‐needed social services for working class families in the industrial centers of francophone Europe. Employing a variety of often controversial tactics, such as squatting to alleviate the housing crisis, the MPF served as a laboratory and training ground for fearless social movement activists. The MPF promoted experiments in radical united working class action, which on occasion challenged the French Communist Party from the left, side‐by‐side with early explorations of feminist ideals. The MPF eventually helped constitute the French New Left.

This chapter examines music's role in the Fête de l'Humanité, an annual festival organized by L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's principal organ. Beyond generating revenue and mobilizing support for the Party, the Fête has long served an important ritual function, fostering a sense of camaraderie among participants. Music has proven particularly effective in this regard, offering a medium through which one's membership in an imagined (communist) community could be experienced. The chapter focuses on the Fête's transformation during the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw the Party struggle to broaden its electoral appeal beyond its working-class base. By expanding the range of musics featured at the event, its organizers sought to address an increasingly diverse electorate. Yet the Party's reliance on the Fête as an instrument of public outreach proved problematic, given that the image of inclusiveness it projected masked rather than resolved the Party's long-term demographic difficulties.

On the morning of 21 August 1941, French Communist Party activists launched a wave of symbolic assassinations by shooting Alfons Moser, a young German naval cadet. Although preoccupied by events on the eastern front during the Moser attack, Hitler learned about subsequent assaults, condemned Stülpnagel's response of gradually increasing reprisals as ‘much too mild’, and ordered the execution of 50 to 100 hostages after every assassination. Wilhelm Keitel, Walther von Brauchitsch, Eduard Wagner, and other senior officers in Berlin condemned Stülpnagel's restraint, joined senior Nazis like Joseph Goebbels, and pressed for severe countermeasures against Jews who allegedly organized all resistance activity. Demonstrating the ideological purity of the SS, Helmut Knochen ordered SS minions to bomb seven Parisian Synagogues, embarrassed Stüpnagel, and earned the enmity of the German military administration. This chapter examines security debates between the military administration, SS, and German diplomats in Paris and a second argument between generals in Paris and Nazis in Berlin.

This chapter explores how the stadium became central to a mode of political spectacle in France, from the mid-1920s up through the end of the Second World War, at a moment when it was also critical to politics elsewhere in Europe. A range of political luminaries and groups, from the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition to the Vichy regime, promoted stadium-based spectacles as a visible manifestation of political vitality, mass support and masculine citizenship. The stadium gave politicians a vast spectator space that proved ideal for staging political rallies, political plays or religious ceremonies that both aspired to transform spectators into active participants and that entailed efforts to discipline the public. But while the crowd may have been disciplined and mobilized inside the stadium, it also eluded those constraints and often disappointed those politicians seeking to create a unified public. In the years after the Second World War, the French stadium gradually disappeared as a pre-eminent staging-ground for mass politics, as the stadium crowd itself became progressively depoliticized.

This chapter examines the French Left. After the fall of France in June 1940, the French parliament convoked in the town of Vichy granted “full powers” to Marshal Pétain, thereby interring the Third Republic and accepting French collaboration with Hitler. Over two-thirds of the Socialist parliamentarians ignored the pleas of their leader Léon Blum and voted yes. The French Left was again in disarray. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Socialist Party split apart and the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) labor confederation experienced a comparable schism. Fifteen years later, a reunited Left forged a Popular Front alliance that won a remarkable electoral victory in 1936. Within two years, the Popular Front collapsed; Munich bitterly divided the Socialist camp; and the French Communist Party went its own way. Under these extreme circumstances, however, the French Resistance created new openings for the Left, in tandem with General Charles de Gaulle's Free France in London.

This chapter examines what it calls the ‘false’ modernity of capitalist democracy or Communist totalitarianism with respect to the relationship between Catholicism and Communist Marxism in 1930s France. In particular, it considers the ideal of a nouvelle chrétienté and how it gave rise to forceful critiques of this ‘false’ modernity and inspired well-informed dépassements of the ideology of Communism that was labelled by the Catholic Church as an integral anti-Catholicism. The chapter then discusses the political, social, and intellectual challenge posed in the Popular Front period by Communism in general and by the French Communist Party in particular. It also analyses the reactions of Catholics to the events of the Popular Front period and the interaction of Catholic Churchmen and laymen with the intellectual currents of the late 1920s and the 1930s, with emphasis on catholicisme intégral's rejection of a dechristianised modern world and its project of a ‘true’ modernity. Finally, the chapter assesses Jacques Maritain's theory of the primacy of the spiritual.

Although the 1945 protests in Paris against Stravinsky's latest music initially concerned aesthetics—rejecting neoclassicism—rather than politics, French students’ heckling of a prominent prewar composer touched a raw nerve. The students, led by Serge Nigg, associated neoclassicism with the discredited Vichy ideal of a French national tradition. Yet in defending Stravinsky, composers allied with the Resistance (including Auric and Poulenc) made ominous references to questionable wartime choices by those who supported the protesters, such as Jolivet. Nigg's prominent role in the protests prefigured his complex political and musical trajectory in early Cold War France after 1948, when the Soviet Union pressured him, along with fellow French Communist Party members, to replace “falsely cosmopolitan tendencies” with the music of their national heritage.